04/17/2007

SAS, a provider of business intelligence (BI), today kick-started 'the Visualization Age,' fundamentally changing the way organizations can transform data into intelligence and wield it as a competitive weapon.

ebizQ received the following details:

Now shipping, SAS® Visual BI software delivers insights into BI that go far beyond the limited graphics available today. Instead of static charts and spreadsheets, organizations using this powerful new SAS software can create interactive “data movies” by manipulating an easy-to-use, motion-enabled, graphical environment. Moving from the static to the interactive helps companies explore ideas, investigate patterns and discover previously hidden facts through visual queries.

Designed for business users, SAS Visual BI helps organizations fully leverage the huge volumes of data they collect. This new SAS solution has its roots in SAS’ proven BI and analytical technology and its JMP® statistical visualization and discovery software. It empowers organizations to transcend information silos, diverse computing platforms and niche tools for new insights that drive smarter, quicker decisions.

According to visualization expert Stephen Few, the founder of Perceptual Edge: “Information visualization is a powerful approach to business intelligence. When used effectively, visualization software extends the reach of traditional business intelligence to new realms of understanding – not as one means among many, but often as the only effective means available.”

SAS far exceeds other BI visualization solutions through a wide range of capabilities organically developed and fully integrated into the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform . SAS has been positioned by Gartner in the Leader's Quadrant in the “Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 1Q07”

SAS Visual BI further extends these robust visualization capabilities, which now include:

• Interactive visualization environments provided throughout the wide spectrum of SAS’ business intelligence solutions



• A comprehensive library of graphics for presentations



• Customizable graphic generation

These capabilities are accessible through the SAS BI Dashboard, which displays all content, including key performance indicators, in a role-based, secure, customizable and extensible environment.

Through SAS Visual BI, users may explore a virtually unlimited number of records and columns; formulate queries and manipulate results in a visual format to achieve rapid insight into relationships and patterns; visualize long-term trends instead of limited year-to-date views; and create graphics incorporating many distinct variables.

SAS Visual BI is a new software solution that merges proven business intelligence and visualization technologies, including SAS' statistical visualization and discovery software, JMP.

Duke Medical Center uses JMP in the Children’s Services business unit to explore data, such as discrepancies in billing and payment, to drive process improvements that yielded a gross revenue increase of 10 percent to 15 percent. The hospital is also ramping up to use JMP to help improve its safety program.

“The volume and complexity of health data interactions really lend themselves to visual depictions that allow us to see the core factors responsible for process inefficiencies,” said David T. Tanaka, MD, Professor of Pediatrics and Associate Director of Neonatology at Duke University Medical Center. “Before using this visualization software, our ability to examine patient care databases was limited to summary tabulations of the data. Now we look at all types of information in a visual format on multiple graphs all linked together on a single screen. We can drill into data, highlight a point and see the related information highlighted on another screen, allowing us to virtually navigate to the real cause of our problem.”

By looking at the data in a graphical and interactive way, clinicians at Duke University Medical Center can even compare the different approaches individual health care providers use to address to the same kind of medical problem. “In this way we can sort out which clinical care path leads to consistently superior results, enabling us to send our patients home both sooner and healthier,” Tanaka said.